"If Anyone Can Beat Me, No One Can Beat Me"

By the time we picked up Amanda outside Glasgow, Karl had begun narrating his gear changes. "Nyaaaaahhh third gear, nyaaaaaahhhh... and into fourth gear!" Eleven hours in traffic from Oxford to Glasgow can... do things to a man.

We had rented a standard transmission versus an automatic at Karl's insistence, despite the fact that he'd only ever practiced in one three times, and the bulk of my standard transmission experience consisted of puttering an old equipment cart full of lawn mowers around a golf course last summer. To his head-swelling credit, though, I am alive to write this.

That night, we went to a church that had been inspirationally converted into a pub, and met Amanda's entertainingly racist Jordanian friend Nadia, who told me I looked Japanese on account of my "squinty eyes." Of the many comments my ivory complexion has evoked over the years, this was certainly a first.

The next morning, we set out to conquer Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in the UK, which I felt eminently qualified to do after having already triumphantly surmounted the mountains of Neuschwanstein in Germany. The hike was beautiful-- we ate Amanda's amazing sandwiches for lunch by a waterfall, and stopped for a drink at a nearby lake--

It was cold.

As we neared the top, we noticed a series of cairns that had been built by other hikers over the ages. I decided I wanted to add the highest stone to each. Ever the douchebag strategist, I devised to choose stones that no one else could balance anything on top of without Jenga-ing the entire pile, at which point Karl summarized my "Napoleonic" strategy with the immortal Ringo-esque malapropism, "If anyone can beat me, no one can beat me!"

Then it began to get quite cold.  And while I did pack some warm clothes for my trip-- my waterproof jacket and sweater came in especially handy when the rains descended upon us-- I more-or-less packed for summer, so certain improvisations had to be made, such as wrapping my pajama pants around my face as a sort of slipshod pashmina scarf, with a pair of socks on each hand as makeshift mittens.

Squinty eyes

The top of the mountain was beautiful- rays of sun reached down from the clouds, gently gilding the valley below, the horizon so far away that it seemed to tilt vertiginously from one end of the sky to the other as you looked at it; thick fog drifted preternaturally amidst the eerie ruins of the old mountain observatory, and Macbeth's tortured specter wandered forlornly though the mist; Karl immediately rushed to pee off the side of the mountain.

 

Indeed, the amazing views made it hard not to get a little meditative...

In between taunting the sheep, David Bowie singalongs, enjoying Pichini's paninis, and endless Michael Caine impersonations, we tried something interesting: caricaturing ourselves. Karl proceeded to brag about his peerless standard-transmission driving skills, and I grandiloquently soliloquized about the "sprawling, verdant sylvan hillsides." Parody and reality blended precariously as I began diligently applying sunscreen on the frigid mountainside the moment the clouds parted.

"Max Applying Sunscreen" could be its own photo album by now.

The idea of caricaturing oneself made me think about identity, and how it is we come to be moulded by the people and places we know into a specific character or persona, and I got to thinking (again) about how it is that people change. How is it that we can escape these archetypes and roles that have been created for us (usually with our complicity), and the layers of habit and stereotype that accrue until they become our characters, and we actually do become caricatures of ourselves?

If we travel to lose ourselves so that we may find ourselves again, maybe the answer lies in the pieces of yourself you choose to use or not use as a way of getting back to "you"-- your trail of breadcrumbs through the forest.

So now I just have to get lost. I'm supposed to be good at that.